At the 2002 American Academy of Religion meeting in Toronto I presented work I had been doing toward the chapter on the Mu`tazila in my dissertation, which eventually became Chapter 4 of The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics. This was my first presentation to the AAR, and I was very grateful for respondent Jane McAuliffe’s encouraging comments.

“Some Epistemological and Hermeneutical Dimensions of the Doctrine of the Created Qurʾān.” American Academy of Religion, Toronto, November 25, 2002.

The Muʿtazilī theologian ʿAbd al‑Jabbār (d. 415/1024) contended that the Ashʿarī defense of God’s eternal speech undermined its epistemological value. He sought to ensure the Qurʾān’s reliability as a source of law by arguing that it is one of God’s acts, a created piece of evidence from which humans are to infer God’s will. This view had three consequences for his hermeneutics. First, the Qurʾān cannot communicate in the same manner as human speech. Second, interpretation consists in reducing all the different forms of Qurʾānic speech to indicative statements about the legal values of acts. Third, the Qurʾān cannot be ambiguous. Contemporary discussions of Islamic legal and interpretive theory have paid little attention to such questions about the nature and function of the language of revelation.

My very first national conference presentation was given in the warm, congenial, and supportive setting of the American Oriental Society meeting in 2002. I presented highlights of the first chapter I wrote for my dissertation, which eventually became Chapter 5 of The Formation of Islamic Hermeneutics:

al‑Bāqillānī constructs his interpretive theory around the ambiguity of the language of revelation. He consistently maintains that a revealed expression may be interpreted only in accordance with established Arabic usage, but if it has more than one possible literal meaning, one must suspend interpretive judgment. For example, he argues that without additional evidence one cannot decide whether or not an imperative expresses a command; whether a command entails an obligation or a recommendation; whether an utterance means one or more than one of its possible meanings; whether an expression that could be general is intended as general or particular; or whether a particular text modifies a general text.

This systematic defense of ambiguity supports the hermeneutical vision embodied in al‑Shāfiʿī’s Risāla. Recent scholarship on the Risāla has studied its attempt to reconcile the law with the Qurʾān and Prophetic Sunna, but has failed to identify its key methodological tool: the systematic exploitation of the ambiguity of the Arabic language, which allows interpreters to reconcile divergent texts into a coherent legal system. al‑Bāqillānī’s Taqrīb provides the theological underpinnings for this hermeneutics of ambiguity. He argues his case for the indeterminacy of meaning by appealing to the Ashʿarī doctrine that God’s speech is an eternal attribute (maʿná), of which the words of revelation are a created expression (ʿibāra). He uses this separation between maʿná and ʿibāra to create an interpretive space between verbal forms and the meanings they express. His work therefore represents a justification of the Shāfiʿī vision of legal theory on the basis of Ashʿarī theology.